The idea of Takashi Miike trying to make a youth-oriented fantasy-adventure film is a perverse and intriguing one. The result is occasionally hilarious, often outlandish, and somewhat bewildering as to what audience it was aimed at, being one part boyish escapade, one part amusingly nasty satire on such juvenilia, and, in totality, a playful ode to the cornucopia of Japanese folk-mythology and the literature and cinema derived from it. It’s like The NeverEnding Story translated by Thomas De Quincey into Japanese and then back again by Lafcadio Hearn.
Adapted from one of a series of novels by Hiroshi Aramata, The Great Yokai War is the tale of a wimpy young boy, Tadashi (Ryûnosuke Kamiki), living with his mother (Kaho Minami) in the house of his senile grandfather (Bunta Sugawara), in a small coastal town following a divorce. Tadashi is anointed as a “Kirin Rider” at an annual religious festival, usually a mere symbolic role that happens this time to entail a very real and urgent mission. The demi-world of the yokai – a kaleidoscopic populace of hobgoblins, imps, symbolic spirits and guardian angels – is being threatened by a once-human overlord sorcerer, Lord Kato Yasunori (Etsushi Toyokawa). By storing up the boundless rage of the natural world at the human race’s waste, can blend and transmogrify wrecked machines and yokai into hideous, malevolent cyborgs capable of carrying supernatural vengeance out into the corporeal world, and, Yasunori plans to use them as his army to wreak chaos on humanity.
Tadashi is rudely introduced to the world of the yokai when he’s tested to confirm his mettle, and then sent to fetch the Kirin Rider’s sword from the goblin who keeps it. He gains a small band of helpmates, including Kawataro (Sadao Abe), a comic relief river sprite who looks a humanoid turtle, Princess Kawahime (Mai Takahashi), a pretty, helpful-minded but misanthropic water spirit who was once an ill-treated festival effigy, and the plush-toy-cuddly Sunekosuri. Tadashi faces off against Yasunori’s lover and aide in wreaking havoc, Agi (Chiaki Kuriyama), a bloody-minded, mini-skirted, white-haired yokai who snaps the magic sword and subjects Sunekosuri to a particularly nasty transformation in punishment for foiling some of her schemes, thus forcing Tadashi to carve up his friend in scenes that could well traumatise any young children watching.
Kuriyama, the familiar face of minxy mayhem from Battle Royale and Kill Bill Vol. 1, lends the film a lot of juice when she holds the focus, which unfortunately isn’t often. Miike isn’t interested in effectively shaping a Spielbergian odyssey-adventure, and instead comes up with an oddity closer in form to Joe Dante’s anarchic takes on such material, particularly his two Gremlins films, with an even wilder bent but without Dante’s lightness of touch or felicity of satire. Modern CGI and slicker production techniques have arguably done much more damage to contemporary Asian fantasy cinema than it has to Hollywood’s, replacing classic ingenuity and a once rock-solid sense of narrative form with bland, cartoonish effects, and Miike only partly wins a self-declared war to invest such effects with individuality and humour, especially in employing some pseudo-Ray Harryhausen-esque stop-motion for the cyborgs.
Miike employs such gleefully lysergic visions as talking, walking walls and long-tongued one-eyed sentient umbrellas. Miike’s efforts finally yearn to unite a vast disparity of modern mutations of the national fantastic tradition under one colossal umbrella, with imagery that pays tribute to many sources, from monster movies (“It’s just Gamera!” shouts a drunk when Yasunori’s colossal floating factory-monster drifts over the Tokyo skyline) to manga and anime standards – colossal demonic landscapes and stygian factories redolent of Legend of the Overfiend and Akira. The humour flows with puckish constancy, some of it fervently surreal, and at other times jokily facile in its chutzpah, like when drinking beer enables one character to see the yokai which are otherwise invisible to adults, or when the day is finally saved by a spilt bean whose sweetness fatally counteracts Yasunori’s final evolution to the strains of an advertising jingle.
The best moments are more subtle, like when one yokai begs Yuki the Snow Woman (Rei Yoshii) – most affectingly incarnated of course in Kobayashi’s Kaidan – for aid in taking on the villains, and she distractedly opts out, citing that it’s “not really my season.” Later, when the thousands of yokai still scattered about the country get wind of a big new festival in Tokyo
